1/ “Hey, Tren, hey, how about a little something, you know, more specific about which stocks were bought by Todd and Ted in the Berkshire 13F, you know.”

I replied “Oh, uh, there won’t be any list, but I will give you the questions to ask, which is nice." sec.gov/Archives/edgar…
2/ For example: How big is the purchase or sale? If a sale, what's the holding period? Is it in Buffet/Munger's circle of competence? Margin of safety given the purchase price? Is the business understandable? Does it have a sustainable moat? Is it a franchise Buffett/Munger love?
3/ Determining what is Todd and Ted is a process of elimination. Munger has said Todd and Ted are free to make their own decisions since Buffett would have hated it at their age. Todd and Ted only have so much capital. That's a clue.

Final exam: who made the pharma investments?
4/ The 13F states Berkshire wasn't required to disclose the name of a stock they are still accumulating.

What's your guess?

"How would you feel if you had to announce every story idea you had?” Warren Buffett

They did this on their IBM mistake. dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/one…
5/ Buffett: "We try not to affect the price. We usually buy a given percentage of what trades every day.”

“There are only about three [investors] I’d like to know what they are doing. But I don’t feel entitled to know.” cnbc.com/2011/11/14/cnb…
6/ The idea that it was Buffett/Munger that sold 4.3M Costco shares as noted in the 13F and not Todd or Ted makes me giggle. We all need a good laugh at a time like this, including me! Todd and Tedd have their own portfolios and make their own decisions. finance.yahoo.com/video/warren-b…
7/ I'm getting reports that the 4.3M shares of Costco are remnants of a Berkshire purchase of 24 million shares during the second quarter of 2000 with a basis of $28.62 per share. So the joke is on me. Which still makes me giggle, so I've got that goin for me, which is nice! Image
"...buys and sells of smaller positions of under $1 billion to $2 billion often reflect activity by Ted and Todd..." barrons.com/articles/what-…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Tren Griffin

Tren Griffin Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @trengriffin

15 Nov
1/ Charlie Munger: “We have the same problem as everyone else: It’s very hard to predict the future."

Seth Klarman: "An unresolvable contradiction exists: to perform present value analysis, you must predict the future, yet the future is not reliably predictable."
2/ Charlie Munger: “Stocks partly sell like bonds, based on expectations of future cash streams, and partly like Rembrandts, based on the fact that they’ve gone up in the past and are fashionable."
3/ "If stocks trade more like Rembrandts in the future, then stocks will rise, but they will have no anchors. In this case, it’s hard to predict how far, how high and how long it will last.”

Charlie Munger on the problems with a Keynesian Beauty Contest approach.
Read 10 tweets
13 Nov
What business is this?
You wanted to see my favorite chart in a S-1?
Have you adjusted to all this adjusting yet?

Is "adjusted EBITDA" redundant since it's adjusting what was already an adjustment?

Should the Department of Redundancy Department be contacted?
Read 4 tweets
13 Nov
1/ "Starlink’s initial pricing — $100 per month and $499 to purchase the Starlink user terminal — is not a beta-only introductory price but reflects what pricing will be in the full commercial service, Starlink Vice President Jonathan Hofeller said."
"Right now there’s a huge amount of demand [for Starlink service] which is excellent. It currently exceeds current supply,” Hofeller said SpaceX hopes to lower the cost of the terminal over time." satellitetoday.com/business/2020/…
3/ A Beta user said: "the system represents a massive upgrade over his DSL provider. If you were to just use Starlink to watch YouTube or Netflix where they download a buffer, it'll feel like great city cable internet. Upload ranges between 10 to 38Mbps.” news.google.com/articles/CAIiE…
Read 4 tweets
10 Nov
Charlie Munger: “There are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that’s still going to be lousy." "Nothing sticks to the ribs of owners."

Is there a barrier to entry for fake meat?
Memphis Meats, MosaMeat, SuperMeat, Integriculture, Aleph Farms, Finless Food., Avant Meats, Balletic Foods, Future Meat, Appleton Meats Higher Steaks, Beyond Meat, LightLife Maple Leaf Foods, Field Roast, Impossible Foods, Kellogg’s Morningstar Farms, Turtle Island Foods...
"Eight brokerages cut their price targets" *after* the stock went down.

"Beyond Meat said it co-created the patty in McPlant, but could not provide any further details, leaving analysts puzzled as to how much Beyond Meat could earn from the tie up." reuters.com/article/busine…
Read 6 tweets
9 Nov
On Covid, please remember:

“A margin of safety is available for absorbing the effect of miscalculations or worse than average luck."

“A lesson inherent in any probabilistic exercise: the frequency of correctness doesn't matter; it's magnitude of correctness that matters.” MM
How should you act to reduce Covid transmission risks if you know or even suspect that there are no reliable models to rely on?

You have only one life.

“There is no way that one can sensibly assign probabilities to the unknown states of the world." 25iq.com/2018/09/08/ris…
“Avoid things like racing trains to the crossing... A lot of success in life and business comes from knowing what you want to avoid. What will automatically do the worst damage and how do I avoid it? Figure out what you don’t want and avoid it and you’ll get what you do want." CM
Read 5 tweets
8 Nov
1/ 1994 was a pivotal year in technology. I had a ringside seat since Bill Gates and Craig McCaw were controlling shareholders in our startup. Part of that year I helped Bill write his book "The Road Ahead." Nathan Myhrvold was a co-author. Writing is an opportunity to think.
2/ One set up: In December 1992, John Malone announced TCI placed orders for 1M million digital set-tops. A story in the NYT predicted 500 channels of programming were on the horizon. In January 1993, Time Warner unveiled plans for a “full service network” to be built in Orlando.
3/ John Malone: ‘The arithmetic is pretty easy – if cable systems have got 50 analog channels, and you can do 10 to 1 compression, that wasn't a huge leap of mathematics to get you to 500 channels.” cablecenter.org/programs/the-h…
Read 16 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!